The refrain that Mexican drug cartels "now maintain a presence in over 1,000 cities" has been widely heard ever since the claim was first made in a 2011 report by the now defunct National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC). But the Washington Post reported Sunday that it isn't true.

The US-Mexico border. The cartels are mainly on the other side of the fence. (wikimedia.org)

The figure is "misleading at best," law enforcement sources and drug policy analysts told the Post. The number was arrived by asking law enforcement agencies to self-report and not based on documented criminal cases involving Mexico's drug trafficking organizations, the so-called cartels.

DEA and Justice Department officials speaking off the record told the Post they didn't believe the numbers.

"It's not a DEA number," said a DEA official who requested anonymity. "We don't want to be attached to this number at all."

"I heard that they just cold-called people in different towns, as many as they could, and said, 'Do you have any Mexicans involved in drugs? And they would say, 'Yeah, sure,' " a Justice Department official told the Post, also anonymously.

The Post also interviewed police chiefs in towns with supposed cartel presence who said they were surprised to be included in the list of cities penetrated by the cartels. "That's news to me," Middleton, NH police chief Randy Sobel told the Post. Corinth, MS, police chief David Lancaster told the Post. "I have no knowledge of that."

Drug policy and drug trafficking analysts also scoffed at the number.

"They say there are Mexicans operating here and they must be part of a Mexican drug organization," said Peter Reuter, a University of Maryland professor and former co-director of the Rand Corporation's Drug Policy Research Center. "These numbers are mythical, and they keep getting reinforced by the echo chamber."

"Washington loves mythical numbers," former longtime Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) official John Carnevale told the Post. "Once the number is out there and it comes from a source perceived to be credible, it becomes hard to disprove, almost impossible, even when it's wrong."

The analysts said the claim was part of pattern in the drug war of promoting questionable statistics to justify drug enforcement budgets.

"At a time when agency budgets are being cut, you want to demonstrate that you are protecting the public from a menace," said Eric Sterling, president of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, a drug- and policing-policy reform group. "If you say there are Mexican henchmen in 1,000 cities, you don't want to cut their budget."

The unjustifiably high number also resulted from definitional problems with the NDIC's effort.

"These definitions are interchangeable and indistinguishable," said Peter Andreas, a Brown University professor whose book "Smuggler Nation" was recently reviewed here. "This is a particularly egregious example of a pattern that unfortunately has not gotten a lot of scrutiny."

The "1,000 cities" canard isn't the only cartel myth widely circulating. For years, law enforcement in the Western US has claimed that Mexican cartels are behind large-scale marijuana grows in national forests and other public lands.Then, in January of this year, ONDCP was forced to admit there was no evidence of cartel involvement in such marijuana grows.

"Based on our intelligence, which includes thousands of cell phone numbers and wiretaps, we haven't been able to connect anyone to a major cartel," Tommy Lanier, head of ONDCP's National Marijuana Initiative, admitted to the Los Angeles Times in January.

He said law enforcement had long mislabeled marijuana grown on public land as "cartel grows" because Mexican nationals had been arrested in some cases and because raising the cartel threat was good for getting federal funding.

So what you're saying is…if people do sick things because of influences other than video games, then video games can't possibly influence people to do sick things?

Unfortunately, this is a basic logical fallacy known as "denying the antecedent," and we can clearly demonstrate the error of its form by substituting your terms:

"If candy is tasty because of ingredients other than salt, then salt can't possibly be an ingredient in tasty things."

Obviously erroneous, the result of logically invalid inference.

Generally speaking I agree with your underlying point, i.e. that video games probably aren't a root cause of systemic violence, but pointing out that Vlad the Impaler didn't play video games does absolutely nothing to prove that point, logically speaking.

As you might have read or heard, a state representative in North Carolina killed a medical marijuana bill yesterday because he felt he and his colleagues were being “harassed” based on the volume of emails and calls they were receiving in support of the legislation.

This is unacceptable. Our democratic process depends on citizens reaching out to their elected representatives to let them know where their constituents stand on the issues. Not only is this type of civic engagement appropriate, it should be encouraged. If anything, such a high volume of calls and emails in support of the medical marijuana bill should be considered a sign that this is an issue worthy of public debate.

Please send a message to Rep. Paul "Skip" Stam asking him to apologize for equating calls and emails from constituents to being “harassed,” and requesting that he call for a hearing regarding medical marijuana.

Despite what Rep. Stam said, elected officials need to hear from their constituents. This is a perfect opportunity to let him know that, so please take action today.